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Sequestration, it’s real and coming…

Sadly, I don’t see any congresscritters actually working ‘productively’ to stop sequestration…Here’s the lead from the Washington Times-

With excruciating detail, the White House’s budget office on Friday laid out exactly where it will have to cut $109 billion from federal spending in January, including $11.1 billion from Medicare and $54.7 billion from defense spending.

The defense cuts include $21.5 billion from operations and maintenance for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and the reserves and National Guard, and nearly $1.4 billion from military aide to Afghanistan, with tens of billions coming from procurement and other Pentagon accounts.

“The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments, and core government functions,” the White House’s budget office said in the report.

Full article HERE. What many may not understand is what the terms operations and maintenance really mean in a military context…Operations includes those little things, like buying gas, oil, etc…Maintenance funds are those base dollars that allow the services to perform their normal functions, like maintaining the equipment when it breaks, performing preventive maintenance inspections e.g. 90 and 210 day inspections on acft, inspecting/replacing safety/survival gear (including body armor). OBTW, the Navy is ALREADY something like $450M behind…And any continued ‘wars’ will no longer be funded by a separate appropriation… It’s now coming out of BASE budgets (e.g. about another 10% hit)…You can read the whole 394 pages HERE. But go to page 9 and look at the non-DOD cuts… Almost all are either Medicare or student loan increases (7.6% I believe), and not a SINGLE cut to an entitlement program!!!As always, I just want to ask, if DOD is 20% of the Federal Budget, why is DOD taking 50% of the cuts???

Sequestration, it’s real and coming… — 20 Comments

And to top it off, hey are already $1 TRILLION over budget for the year. Hell, you could yank 100% of the military budget and not make a dent. I’m sure Obama thinks it’s to his advantage to let things go – really don’t think it is. Time will tell . . . .

And for the idiots who believe this will change, as long as we have an ‘R’ or ‘D’ in the government (Congress or the White House), we will be in the crapper. The only difference is how fast we circle the bowl.

Flogging the obvious: the Left always cuts the military, which it despises & can’t understand. Having seen the RIF following Viet Nam, along with my destroyer sitting in port for six months during the oil embargo in ’74, this comes as no surprise. They despise a strong military, and have no idea what it’s for.

I started seeing the early cuts prior to retiring. I really feel for the military right now, you have to givve them the tools to do their jobs, and that is not happening now. I like MSGT’s comment, hits it right on top of the nail.

MSgtB, I’d rather have the EBT-holders rioting. They don’t have the firepower that the DoD folks do. And I’d be happier defending myself against the EBT-rioters than DoD personnel.

As for sequestration, it’ll not just affect DoD directly, but imagine the number of programs that will be cut, the manufacturing jobs cut, orders not placed, secondary effects of cutting DoD spending, etc. Oh, and don’t forget, there’s penalty clauses that DoD must pay when a program is cancelled. And if not cancelled, costs go up significantly. O’Bumbler doesn’t understand economics. More folks on Unemployment or Disability…Sigh.